Heretofore, an increasing need for flat panel display units that can be connected to each other in a mosaic-like fashion, to form a larger display area having various sizes and shapes, has been recognized by industry in such technical fields relating to computers.
The display system for the Apple Macintosh.RTM. is one attempt at solving this problem. The Macintosh.RTM. display system provides display panels that can be arranged in any desired manner to form a larger display area as long as the display panels do not overlap with each other. That is, the displays can be arranged into different configurations as long as the logical display area of the configuration does not provide redundancy between the display panels.
A configuration of such displays, however, can be utilized by only one source device (i.e. one Macintosh.RTM. computer). As a result, the Macintosh.RTM. panel display system is source device specific, and thus not useful to those having a need to interface a plurality of source devices to a display area consisting of a plurality of such Macintosh.RTM. panel displays. In addition, the Macintosh.RTM. display system is not desirable or useful to those having a need to interface different types of source devices (e.g. TV's, computers and network devices) to the same display area.
Moreover, each display panel or unit of the Macintosh.RTM. system is driven and controlled by a separate display control card placed in the expansion slots of the source device (i.e. Macintosh.RTM. computer). As a result, since each source device has a limited number of expansion slots available for such control cards, the number of displays that can be added to the display area is limited, and thus the size of the display area of the Macintosh.RTM. display system is limited.